Use of the Internet by the general public is certainly gaining popularity. More and more people are getting access to the Internet and the vast amount of information that it provides. Due to the rapid increase in the number of Internet users, advertising on the Internet has consequently become an important priority for many advertisers.
As a result, for web portals and ISPs, a significant amount of revenue can be generated from displaying advertisers' ad banners on displayed websites or web pages. For example, for a preeminent portal such as Yahoo! which is visited daily by millions of users, considerable revenue can be made by displaying an advertiser's ads on its websites or web pages.
Generally, the advertisers pay a fee for each ad viewed by web users. Contracts to show ads are normally signed several weeks/months before the ads get delivered. The duration of contracts ranges from one day to multiple years. Typically, there are several types of contracts, including regular contracts, exclusive contracts and infinite contracts. For regular contracts, the advertisers purchase a designated number of ad views on a chosen space (web page). For exclusive contracts, they purchase all the ad views on a chosen space. For infinite contracts, they purchase all the leftover ad views on a chosen space after other regular contracts related to that space have been fulfilled.
Like advertising conducted through more traditional medium, such as TV or printed publications, advertising on the Internet is similarly subject to physical limitation. For obvious reasons, it is a natural and often most selected choice for advertisers to request ad views on the more popular web pages. However, since there is a finite amount of physical space on a web page, demand for ad space or ad views on popular web pages often exceeds supply. Thus, information on the level of available inventory is needed so advertisers can be advised appropriately to avoid overbooking of web pages.
In addition, while new contracts for ad views go into effect everyday, old contracts expire at the same time. The volume of newly subscribed ad views does not necessarily match that of expiring ad views. Hence, the level of available inventory varies depending on the pending and expiring contracts. In that regard, ascertaining the level of available inventory is also important. For example, ideally, the level of available inventory should be kept as low as possible so as to maximize advertising revenue. Therefore, it would be desirable to provide a method and system which is capable of ascertaining the level of available inventory on a system-wide basis.
Moreover, the placement of ads is often, to a large extent, affected by demographics. Consequently, contracts to show ads often specify the target demographic group. Thus, before a contract is executed, it would be helpful to know the quantity of available inventory for the specified target demographic group. Therefore, it would be desirable to provide a method and system which is capable of providing advertising inventory information in response to demographic inquiries.
Furthermore, representing all the information in an advertising inventory database is a non-trivial task. This is due to the need to order the large number of combinations of demographic values over time. It is empirically determined that approximately 1035 combinations of demographic attributes need to be represented. This high number of combinations is infeasible to implement in a database. Therefore, it would also be desirable to provide a method and system which is capable of effectively storing inventory information in a database.